Expanding on that for the benefit of those who may find joy in trifling:
- Noun: 関係 [kankei] -- A noun which roughly means relations/involvement
- Component Kanji
--- 関: Semantically equates to "connection"
--- 係: Semantically equates to "participation"
- Verb: ない [nai] -- A foundational verb which inverts ある [aru]. ある is how you concretely indicate that something exists in a specific way. ない is how you concretely indicate that something exists NOT in that specific way.
So... putting it all together; the phrase is a grammatically complete utterance that more or less says "this is anything but material to that". Something which this rough translation fails to convey is the flexibility of the saying -- depending on context it can be used to communicate anything from "that's irrelevant" to... "none of my business" or even... "none of your concern"
Comments
The article doesn't dive into all the words (it only covers eight of them). I found them in a different article https://maynkmodi.substack.com/p/23-new-japanese-words-made-...:
(katsu and tonkatsu have two definitions.)
Here's the OED's press release with more detail:
https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.idmgroup.oed100.sound...
In Japanese:
https://s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.idmgroup.oed100.sound...
And a list of all the new words in this update, not just Japanese
https://www.oed.com/information/updates/march-2024/new-word-...
my current favourite bit of japanese: 関係ない(kankeinai)
"this is superfluous: its connection with what we are talking about has a weight ~0"
Expanding on that for the benefit of those who may find joy in trifling:
- Noun: 関係 [kankei] -- A noun which roughly means relations/involvement
- Component Kanji
--- 関: Semantically equates to "connection"
--- 係: Semantically equates to "participation"
- Verb: ない [nai] -- A foundational verb which inverts ある [aru]. ある is how you concretely indicate that something exists in a specific way. ない is how you concretely indicate that something exists NOT in that specific way.
So... putting it all together; the phrase is a grammatically complete utterance that more or less says "this is anything but material to that". Something which this rough translation fails to convey is the flexibility of the saying -- depending on context it can be used to communicate anything from "that's irrelevant" to... "none of my business" or even... "none of your concern"